David Oliver: NHS England targets for new and follow-up outpatient appointments are ill conceived

In February 2022 NHS England published its Delivery Plan for Tackling the Covid-19 Backlog of Elective Care,1 aiming for an unprecedented 30% rise in elective activity by 2024-25. In an effort to cut waiting times and the number of people waiting for first appointments, the plan set an improbably ambitious target of reducing follow-up outpatient visits by 25% by March 2023 from 2019-20, to leave more capacity for first appointments. All first appointment waits of over 52 weeks were to be abolished by 2025.Last month the Health Service Journal2 reported that the latest NHS digital hospital episodes statistics3 showed 124.2 million outpatient appointments in 2022-23—no increase in overall volume from 124.4 million in 2019-20 and 123.4 million in 2018-19, despite the targets. Around 65.1 million follow-up appointments were recorded in 2022-23, down slightly from 65.4 million in 2019-20 and 66 million in 2018-19.To nobody’s surprise, the targets set in 2022…
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